On Saturday, D'Angelo and his band, The Vanguard, started things off slow with their performance of the ballad "Really Love" from "Black Messiah." They used their second song, "Charade," to acknowledge the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed black men who were killed by police officers last year, spawning the #BlackLivesMatter protests.

The Vanguards wore "Black Lives Matter" and "I Can't Breathe" T-shirts, the latter in reference to Garner's last words, while D'Angelo wore a hooded sweatshirt for half of his performance in what seemed to be a tribute to Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen who was killed in Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer in 2012.

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